Euphoria by Lily King Page B

not attributed the death of Sali’s baby to her presence at the birth. Not yet, anyway. When she had visited Sali the night before, she had rested her head on Nell’s shoulder for a long time. Her child had been buried two days earlier in a clearing a half hour’s walk away. Sali carried him, his tiny body painted with red clay, his face with white, his little chest decorated with shells. In one hand they’d put a piece of sago cake, in the other a child’s miniature flute. His father dug a shallow grave. Just before Sali lowered him in, she squeezed a few drops of milk from her full hard breast onto the painted lips and Nell ached for those lips to move but they did not and then they covered him with brown sandy soil.
    Fen came in through the mosquito net with a cup of coffee for her. He sat on the bed and she raised herself to take the cup from him.
    ‘Thank you.’
    He sat sideways to her, crushed a pale blue weevil with his shoe, stared at the cloth that covered the window. He had a small head, considering his length and girth. It made his eyes and shoulders look bigger than they actually were. His beard grew fast and dark. He had shaved the night before but already it had sprouted back up, not the midnight blue that appeared after a few hours like a storm cloud but real hairs that grew two or three to a pore. Women everywhere thought him good-looking. She had thought him beautiful at first, on that boat on the Indian Ocean.
    He knew she’d been crying and wouldn’t look at her.
    ‘I just want to keep one child alive.’
    ‘I know,’ he said, but did not touch her.
    Below they had begun to whap sticks at the supports.
    ‘Where are you off to today?’ she said.
    ‘I’m going to help with the canoe.’
    Working on the canoe, which he had been doing for the past five days, meant digging out the insides of an enormous breadfruit tree so that eight men could travel inside it. It meant another day without note taking, another day of failing to gather hard information.
    ‘Luro is going to Parambai today, to help settle the dispute about Mwroni’s bride price.’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘Mwroni. Sali’s cousin.’
    ‘I’m going to help with the canoe, Nell.’
    ‘We just don’t have any idea about how they negotiate—’
    ‘It’s not my fault you aren’t pregnant.’
    The lie of it hung between them.
    ‘I keep doing my part,’ he said.
    I would be seven months along now, she thought. He knew it too.
    Behind the scrim she heard Bani fixing Fen’s breakfast and singing. She couldn’t understand the words. Songs always came last. Often they were strings of names, a line of ancestors, with no breaks between words.
Madatulopanararatelambanokanitwogo-mrainountwuatniwran
, he sang, high alto and with tenderness. He could be so serious it was hard to remember he was just a boy.
    Bani had told her that he was not a Tam by birth. He was a Yesan, stolen by the Tam in a raid in retaliation for the kidnapping of a Tam girl a Yesan man was in love with. Hethought he was less than two when it happened. She asked who raised him and he said many people. She asked who was his family here and he said she and Fen.
    ‘Do you see your mother?’ she asked.
    ‘Sometimes. If I go with the women to the market. She is very skinny.’
    Nell hadn’t understood tinu, skinny, until he sucked in his stomach and pressed his arms to his sides. He had initiation scars from shoulder to wrist and down his back, raised bumps they created by deliberately infecting the cuts.
    ‘What do you feel when you see her?’ she asked.
    ‘I feel I am happy I am not skinny and ugly like she.’
    ‘And she? What does she feel?’
    ‘She feels our Tam women ask too much for fish. That is what she says every time.’
    Fen’s gong signal rang out.
    ‘Bloody hell,’ he said, scooting off the mat. ‘Why is he so damn slow?’
    ‘Don’t be hard on him.’
    She heard him tell Bani to put his food in a basket. ‘Hurry.’
    The noise below swelled as he